


Fallen Human

by seekingmoonscapes



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode Related, Episode: s09e01 I Think I'm Gonna Like It Here, Gen, Human Castiel, Minor Character Death, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-13
Updated: 2015-01-13
Packaged: 2018-03-07 11:09:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3172246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingmoonscapes/pseuds/seekingmoonscapes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was not the first corpse he had seen; he had seen thousands, millions. It was not even the first of his making, he was a soldier, a warrior, a creature drenched in death. It was also not (and he shuddered with guiltshameagonyfear at the memories) the first of his kin that he had slain. </p><p>But it was his first kill as a man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fallen Human

**Author's Note:**

> This is the missing scene between Castiel killing Hael and turning up at the laudrette. I don't know why that scene affected me so much, but after watching it again I was compelled to take a look into what was running through Castiel's mind.

A broken corpse sprawled out before him, her eyes wide and accusing, her blood seeping into the dirt. It had not rained here for several days and the grass below her was eager to soak up this offering.  It was not the first corpse he had seen; he had seen thousands, millions. It was not even the first of his making, he was a soldier, a warrior, a creature drenched in death. It was also not (and he shuddered with guiltshameagonyfear at the memories) the first of his kin that he had slain.

But it was his first kill as a man.

He was still shaking from the raw physicality of it. His graceless body betrayed him. He had known, distantly, dismissively, of the toxins and electricity that fuelled the human form. He had never realised how it ravaged them, controlled them. He somehow felt exhilarated yet terrified extemporaneously, its lungs dragging in great, heaving gusts of air without his permission and its every limb trembling with the overload.

The blood splattered across his neck from the withdrawal was warm but cooling on his skin already. He could still feel, like some strange phantom of the sensation, the sick burst of the punctured skin and the resistant flesh, the jarring moment when he’d nicked bone and he’d lost his grip – his hand was tender, bruised, from where it’d slammed into the hilt. He no longer had the strength or precision to slice through a body as if it were paper. 

He drew in a long shuddering breath and closed his eyes on the exhale, trying to find some calm within the warring hormones roaring through his brain. He had to focus. He had new concerns, beyond the severing of his wings and his body’s alien compulsions. Now this vessel betrayed its passage through the world; it sweated and moulted and flaked like an endless microcosm of its mortality. A hundred years ago, it wouldn’t have mattered, but this was the century that humans had learnt to hunt themselves.

First, he needed to clean off the evidence. He wiped his blade on the grass quickly, his eyes fixed on the road in case of anyone drove by. Nobody did, but that didn’t stop his mind flooding with its chemical fear. His hands were still shaking when he climbed into the car, making the key and its many odd attachments rattle as he turned the ignition. He didn’t stop at the next town, or second, but the third was built along a river deep enough for his purposes. He pushed the car over its artificial stone bank, muscles burning and skin slippery with sweat, before trudging into town under the cover of dusk.

He found a laundrette. An elderly woman looked up and stared at him in horror. He knew it was the blood that she saw but he looked down anyway. He’d forgotten how far it had spread. Two days ago he could have wiped it from existence. Now he was forced to this. He stripped out of his clothes, slamming each layer on the side, and realised with some surprise that this was anger. Not the powerful, righteous fury of angelic wrath, but the helpless, purposeless frustration of human anger.

He still had the money the truck driver had given him, enough to destroy the last piece of evidence linking him to the corpse by the side of road with two shattered legs and a knife wound through her chest. Except his eyes stung and his lower abdomen ached and his mouth felt like he’d gargled with sand. And he couldn’t ignore it; couldn’t push it aside like the minor inconvenience it was (the human body could survive three days without water, three weeks without food, 11 days without sleep, so why was it _screaming_ at him?). But he needed clean clothes. He fidgeted with indecision, tapped his coin against the drawer and rolled it between his fingers. Another new sensation; his emotional mind bleeding through to his physicality. 

His eyes slid to the side. An unattended basket, maybe pulled out of a dryer that someone else wanted to use, was full of clean, free clothes. Theft was as much a human construction as modesty.

He left the laundrette quickly, hand wrapped tightly around his bottle, and the chill of the night tickled his cheeks as he discovered that water was sweet


End file.
